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Ant writes "BetaNews reports that Google quietly updated its maps service late Monday to include satellite imagery, a first in the industry... Much of Google Maps remains the same - just with detailed pictures from high-tech satellites instead of standard map graphics. Maps can be dragged to view adjacent areas, which means users do not have click and wait for graphics to reload. Zooming is also instantaneous with the help of a slider placed atop the map." The resolution doesn't seem very high, but the integration is very seamless.

Great googly-moogly. Stop with cheap low-res sat photos and try adding a scale to your maps. You know, one of the basic features of a map? The little hashed bar that gives me some idea how far it is from one point on the map to another. I realize it is not innovative or amazingly cool, but it kinda renders your maps useless otherwise.

Break the images into 200x200 pixel chunks at each resolution and save those chunks as individual image files

Put a javascript interface on

Rather than working with fixed resolution images, you're must better off using wavelet compression [wikipedia.org] to store your images. As well as up to 50:1 compression ratios, you can easily stream out whatever resolution you need, without having to uncompress all the data first. ECW [es-geo.com] and related formats have been used by GIS [wikipedia.org] systems for many years, long before Google joined the party. Still, it's nice to see so much information publically available.

I'm certainly looking forward to when Google add the UK data, so I don't have to rely on the limited service from GetMapping [getmapping.com]:-)

And it would be wrong, imo, since the photos were/are still available from many other sources.

I would think the reason was cost. The photos cost money to licence, cost money to store, and cost money to transmit. Mapquest is primarily a mapping/direction service. Adding photos didn't add much to their product, but added to their cost. My guess: It simply wasn't worth it.

To you and all the others who made this suggestion (and who were modded as "insightful" rather than "redundant") the maps thing is still only a BETA after all. One day soon, the mighty google will give you all your christmas presents, with added paranoia.

Perhaps that is why certain images from Google have been obscured? Several buildings on and near the White House property have been covered up. The entire grounds of the Capitol building are blurry (while the surrounding area is 10x or 100x sharper)... Commence the conspiracy theories!

Let me get this straight... You're breaking CSS stylesheets with rules that you wrote because some websites do annoying things with them. These rules screw up Google's site, and you expect Google to rewrite their site? It's not going to happen.

I have a rule in my userContent.css that sets display: none for embedded iframes, because some websites use them in obnoxious ways, but if a legitimate site has one, I'm not going to tell them that they need to change everything just because my user stylesheet is interfering with their site. I'd try to hack around it, and if I couldn't do that, I could either take the rule out and stop browsing annoying websites, or deal with it like anyone else who doesn't have a user stylesheet. Telling other sites not to use something because you don't like it is like telling everyone you know to talk louder because you're going deaf and don't want a hearing aid.